Ann Marie Lipinski resigned Monday after seven years as editor of the Tribune. She's being replaced by Gerould Kern, vice president of editorial for the Tribune Company's Tribune Publishing subsidiary.

Lipinski said she's no longer a good fit for the job. She'd held the job of editor about as long as most of that paper's editors do, if not longer, but her sudden resignation, with the Tribune in flux and jobs being slashed, is troubling. Like most Tribune editors--but unlike Kern, who joined the Tribune from the Daily Herald as an editor in 1991--Lipinski came up through the paper's newsroom ranks; in 1988 she won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting. And, in my perception at least, she championed the meticulous coverage of serious matters as journalism's supreme virtue.